“If Martin Lewis can’t find the answers to the cost of living crisis, and make it add up, then we sure as hell can’t,” says Rebecca White.
She founded the Norwich-based social enterprise Your Own Place in 2013, with the aim of preventing homelessness by holding workshops for tenants to equip them with life skills and knowledge.
On the frontline, she and her team have seen first-hand the struggles that people were already facing to cover their living costs and keep a roof over their heads.
And that is something that is going to get worse as the impact of the rise in energy prices and other essential bills on already stretched budgets is felt.
“The truth is we work with people in desperate situations and they were in a desperate situation on March 31 and they were in a desperate situation on March 1,” says Rebecca.
“Now undoubtedly, there’s a whole load of people who were getting by who are not now going to get by. And that is many of us, there’s no them and us here. But we have to be really clear that if you’re scraping along the bottom, and life is appalling, it just got a bit more appalling.
“And people are in debt, they’re in more debt. We will also see people who will be in debt for the first time, who will miss their rent payments for the first time, who will go to foodbanks and feel shame for the first time, so there is no doubt that that group of people for whom this will be absolutely horrendous is growing.”
Rebecca grew up in south Norfolk, “from a very socialist background.” She moved to London where she was a teacher for three years before moving into the charitable sector.
Her experiences of working in south east London with homeless people and young offenders were eye-opening, and laid the foundations for Your Own Place.
She started out as a support worker for a charity called RPS Rainer, which later became Catch22, which worked with homeless young people.
“I was there for three incredible years really working with people in impossible situations,” she says.
“Most them were young people, young people who had been in the care system, young people who were refugees, young people who for whatever reason hadn’t been in care but had been abandoned by their parents and were in supported accommodation facing impossible barriers almost entirely not of their own making.
“And that opened my eyes. Having grown up in south Norfolk, I’d never really experienced that sort of thing.”
Rebecca says that a lot of the barriers the people she worked with faced were systemic – and what people really needed was compassion. And it's fuelled her determination to do things differently.
“They were systems and structures that were just not really adequately resourced to work with people who had suffered profound trauma or rejection in childhood.
“I worked with child soldiers from Congo and a girl who had been trafficked from Ethiopia, an Eritrean girl who’d been raped throughout her childhood.
"These left untold scars and trauma that then meant that wherever they ended up simply wasn’t resourced to manage them as people suffering pain and then we wonder why at 16, 17 that becomes other behaviours that we label as angry or violent or difficult when actually it’s the tip of the iceberg.
“Seeing the difference it could make treating people decently was extraordinary,” she says.
In her next post, Rebecca undertook resettlement work in prisons.
“I found myself working for Greenwich Youth Offending Team with the probation officers that had been through the Stephen Lawrence enquiry and would walk up that road every day to work where he was murdered, again just starting to see how people's lives were very, very different from mine.”
That was followed by her first management job, which was working on a Home Office funded project to reduce knife crime in south east London, after the murder of Damilola Taylor in Peckham.
“I feel so lucky to have had those experiences, to have managed incredible teams, people turning their backs on the experiences they’ve had to become our colleagues and try and fight knife crime and give people second, third and fourth chances. So those 10 years in London really were everything that led up to why Your Own Place exists.”
When she was in her 30s, she and her partner returned to Norfolk.
“Coming backing to Norfolk was deeply personal, my mum was dying and so I came back to look after mum, and dad to some degree, with my partner at the time,” she says.
Rebecca joined Norfolk County Council, working in commissioning for children’s services.
At the same time, against the odds, Your Own Place was starting to take shape.
“There’s no grand tale about setting Your Own Place up, there was no grand plan,” says Rebecca.
“I had no funding to do it, I had never had any backing or money. I had to juggle working for the county council because I had a mortgage to pay while vaguely doing one day a week on Your Own Place.
“And then the relationship broke down after 18 years as well, so I had less money and lost my home, all while I was trying to set Your Own Place up.
“So, 2013, 14, 15 was incredibly hard,” she says, candidly.
“Your Own Place was my everything, really. I threw everything into it and juggled the two jobs.
"I had no funding so I couldn’t do it for a living, so I just set it up and started to try ideas out, trying workshops out.
“What I did know is what I wanted to do, which was utilise my skills to deliver workshops and work with people in a different way. I felt I'd seen it done badly and I felt I’d seen people treated badly, people short-changed and wanted to show that it could work. By treating people just basically decently, you could build different relationships and have better outcomes and that’s all I really knew.”
In a moment of serendipity, an email popped into her inbox from the School for Social Entrepreneurs which ran a course about how to set up a social enterprise.
Thinking that could be the right way to go, Rebecca enrolled, studying alongside her day job.
“We’re a community interest company, and what that means is that we’re not for private profit,” she explains.
“We are for profit, but profit’s not a bad thing, because 100 per cent goes toward our social purpose and investing in our business and making us better and reaching more people.”
You Own Place’s founding principles are proudly displayed on the wall of their premises – a social housing flat near Chapelfield Gardens, where we meet for our interview.
“Our absolute founding principle is that we are equal,” she says. “And empathy. People don’t need sympathy or pity, but sometimes they just need people to appreciate and recognise their situation.
“A lot of people won’t take support, and I include myself in that. We feel shame, we feel blame, we feel failure when we need help.
“And actually, the cost of living crisis is a really good example. There’s no shame in that, that was not of your making.”
Rebecca describes the current system as “broken” in her view.
“We’re stuck in a very philanthropic Victorian model I think in our sector. We fix people, we do things for them, we advise them, we tell them what’s best for them.
"I think people know what’s best for them and I think we all have experiences to draw on, situations where we’ve been before which if we’re coached to find them, asked what worked for us before and what will work for us again, most people are the experts at themselves.
“By drawing out people’s strengths, drawing out what people can do well, we build their confidence and they recognise that actually they can find their own solutions. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes if you’re in crisis you need a life ring, but we’re not in that business. We’re not in the crisis business, we’re in the preventing the crisis business.
“I want to try and prove that it can be done a different way. I haven’t proven it yet, but that’s what I want to do.”
Your Own Place has grown to a team of 10: six facilitators who go out on the road and deliver bespoke tenancy and independent living skills workshops, two operational managers who oversee all the projects and project-related relationships and an administrator.
It is commissioned by housing associations and stock holding housing authorities to work with people who are housed, including in temporary housing and supported housing.
Four of its key customers are Saffron Housing, Orwell Housing, Freebridge Housing and Broadland Housing Association. They also work with North Norfolk District Council, Sanctuary Supported living and a charity in Brighton which supports homeless young people.
“Whilst the workshops may include content around bills, around debt, around housing options they’re much, much, much more than that,” says Rebecca.
Attending a workshop is a big first step and people may be put off because they think it will be like school, so they remove as many barriers as possible – it's why the people leading the workshops are called facilitators and they start building relationships with the participants ahead of time.
Group numbers are deliberately kept small – no more than eight at a time – so that everyone gets lots of individual support.
“What the workshops actually do are build people’s confidence or enable people to see their strength, so they build knowledge, skills, confidence and resilience, whether that’s in financial skills, relationship skills, employment skills or housing knowledge.
“They may go away with more information and knowledge, but what they’ll really go away with is the confidence to get help.
“Empowering is an over-used word, but that’s the point – because of the confidence they’ve suddenly got, for the first time they’ll pick up the phone to the debt agency or the water company or electricity company and have the conversation that they’ve been putting off because they’ve been worried.
“And they’ll realise that actually professionals want to help, people don’t want to evict them, people don’t want to cut the electrics off, that often it’s a catalyst for taking those first steps.
“Housing associations talk about resilient communities, resilient tenants - that’s what resilience looks like in practice.”
When Rebecca talks about her schedule it truly does sound like there aren’t enough hours in the day.
“To give a flavour, today my day started at 7.30am, wiping GDPR spreadsheets to make sure that we’re GDPR compliant, and then at 9am I met with my two managers and their coach, because we pay for coaching to support the development of the team, to review how that had gone.
“At 10.30am I had a Zoom call with potential new customers to iron out what that contract’s going to look like, at 12 I had an operational meeting to unpick how a project is going, 1pm, quick team meeting catch-up, 2.30pm, shortlisting for a new post, 3.30pm a management meeting, 5pm here.
“And that’s frenetic, that’s in and out of different things, different brain spaces, all of those meetings require preparation. And tomorrow we do it all again, all whilst maintaining all the systems, paying the invoices, making sure people are looked after, the floor is hoovered.
“And the team are fantastic. This last two years for obvious reasons have been unbelievably hard and it’s getting harder. Coming out of Covid doesn’t mean some kind of end is in sight. If anything, it’s as hard as it’s ever been, because the world has changed.
“And I’m proud that these values are not just written on a wall or in a policy document, that the team, live, breathe, speak them every single day and bring so much of themselves to work and work so hard and care so much and do such a great job.”
Rebecca speaks matter-of-factly about how her work, which has been an anchor during turbulent times, is her priority in life and leaves little time for anything else.
“I’ve always been an over-worker,” she admits. "And definitely in the early days, Your Own Place got me through my relationship breakdown.
“I get up at 5am every day, because exercise at the start of the day is a priority for me. It gets me in the right headspace. It tires me too as I get older, but sleep, food and exercise are my three non-negotiables and no matter what I’m doing, where I’m going, I will make space for those because I couldn’t keep going if I didn’t.”
Her focus on her work means that she has to make compromises elsewhere.
“During my childhood and younger years, I did a lot of music. My family have a strong musical history, I grew up with music and I miss that,” she says.
“I’ve reconciled myself that you can’t have everything and that my diary has to be so flexible. My downtime, what little there is before bedtime, is precious. It doesn’t allow me to belong to a choir, it doesn’t allow me to belong to a club that I go to regularly, I just wouldn’t be able to commit.”
But this year, she has started going to a weekly yoga class.
“And that is pushing it because that requires routine and stopping at a certain time. So those things are hard and I miss them. And there’s definitely an absence in my life, because time is short.”
Rebecca attributes her incredible drive and work ethic to lessons learned in her childhood.
“A lot of that comes from my upbringing,” she says. “My childhood was littered with intellectual conversation from a very socialist background about inequality. And those experiences in London, seeing other worlds, other lives, my own upbringing was safe and loving, [there was] never really any money, but it was privileged in its safety and you take safety for granted - I remember I did.
“In London when I started working with street gangs, who were frankly stabbing and shooting each other, I remember being so grateful I could cycle home and lock my door and be safe - and other people didn’t have that privilege, that home was not a place of safety.
“I can’t think of a non-religious phrase for it, because I’m not religious, but there but for the grace of God go I is the phrase that I always come back to. That it’s pure chance that I was born in my family and somebody else was born in their family, it’s just the roll of the dice from which your entire life is pretty much mapped out.
“Your life outcomes will be determined by a whole load of early experiences that are not within your gift and that to me seemed deeply unfair, deeply, deeply unfair and so I do what I do. I could have gone and done a whole load of things, probably, earned more money and had more creative time, but I didn’t, I care about this.
“I’m not some selfless hero, I get a huge kick from it, this is my career, it’s a job, it pays my bills, like it does anybody else. I’m good at it, why wouldn’t I do it,” she says.
Rebecca’s goal has always been for Your Own Place to become sustainable – so given what a large part it plays in her life, it comes as a surprise when she says in order for it to do that, she may have to step away from it.
“Our mission stays the same, to prevent homelessness, and to do it with all our values intact, but the road to achieving that inevitably shifts,” she says.
“Sustainability I think means a couple of things. It means we remain as a traded social enterprise model, so we bring in our income from customers who are prepared to pay properly for it so that we can resource the team to be well and to thrive and make a profit from it that then invests in innovation.
“Sustainability also has to unfortunately mean growth, because only with growth can we bring in the resource that we need, so that we’re not all working so hard.
“And sustainability, also means me leaving. I don’t think founders should stick around I think why would I have all the answers, why would I know what Your Own Place needs for its next stage?
“Next year will be 10 years, [and] I think sustainability means it shouldn’t rely on somebody working as hard as I do.”
When the time comes for her to leave Your Own Place behind, does Rebecca have any idea what she would like to move on to? You get the feeling that whatever it is, it has to be something which will challenge her.
“I’ve no idea,” she says. “A holiday? I honestly don’t know. Like everybody else I need a job, I’ve got bills to pay. All I know is that I’ve learned a lot and, if anything, even me doing this is another example of what people can do.
“I’m not special, I’m not doing this because I have any special gift, I’ve just learnt as I’ve gone along, and that’s the gift of opportunity. I have the self-belief, and self-worth to grab the opportunity and make it work.
“I could have stayed in the same job and not developed at all, and as it is I’ve found out that actually I’m quite good at finance and actually I’m quite good at managing people and actually I’m quite good at bringing in business, and I would have never known those things - and who knows what all of us are capable of that we never unlock?”
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